In his farewell address, President Eisenhower mentions the dangers of 'misplaced power' by the new military-industrial complex and huge federal research grants replacing curiosity of solitary inventors. Paul Stamets, entrepreneur and recipient of the AAAS-Lemelson Invention Ambassador award, surely helps to alleviate Eisenhower's fears.

From the MSA website:"The purpose of the Wasson Award is to recognize people with non-traditional academic backgrounds who have made outstanding contributions to the field of mycology, or who have widely transmitted significant scientific or aesthetic knowledge about fungi to the general public. Nominees for the award will be judged on the basis of the impact and quality of their contributions and on their sustained commitment to the field of mycology."

According to MSA's newsletter, Inoculum, Stamets designed his own curriculum at Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA, under the guidance of Michael Beug and became a self-taught mycologist. He authored his first two books at Evergreen, Psilocybe Mushrooms and their Allies and The Mushroom Cultivator. Stamets' most popular book, Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms, is the #1 best seller among mushroom books on Amazon and has been cited 740 times on Google Scholar.

When presenting the award, Mycological Society of America president Jean Lodge describes Stamets' importance to the field of mycology:
​"Anytime I get on a plane and I sit down next to somebody and explain that I work on fungi, there is always this... Do you know? Do you know? And the fill-in-the-blank is always Paul Stamets.

Paul has done more for recruiting young mycologists into graduate programs, I think, than all of us sitting in professional jobs. He is just so good at outreach and getting people enthused....He's contributed a tremendous amount to our field."
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​In this video from the first Psychoactivity Conference: A Multi-Disciplinary Conference on Plants, Shamanism & States of Consciousness in Amsterdam, Stamets described the story of the MSA Wasson Award's namesake, R. Gordon Wasson. Stamets shared the stage that year with Albert Hofmann, Christian Raetsch, Alex Grey, Giorgio Samorini, and other pioneers.

"Mushroom mycelium represents rebirth, rejuvenation, regeneration. Fungi generate soil, that gives life. The task that we face today is to understand the language of nature.

My mission is to discover the language of nature of the fungal networks that communicate with the ecosystem. And I, in particular believe nature is intelligent.
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The fact that we lack the language skills to communicate with nature does not impugn the concept that nature is intelligent, it speaks to our inadequacy of our skill-set for communication.
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We have now learned that there are these languages that are occurring in communication between each organism. If we don’t get our act together and come in commonality and understanding with the organisms that sustain us today, not only will we destroy those organisms, but we will destroy ourselves.

We need to have a paradigm shift in our consciousness. What will it take to achieve that? If I die trying but I'm inadequate to the task to make a course change in the evolution of life on this planet, OK, I tried. The fact is, I tried. How many people are not trying?

If you knew that every breath you took could save hundreds of lives in the future having walked down this path of knowledge would you run down that path of knowledge as fast as you could?

I believe nature is a force of Good. Good is not only a concept, it is a spirit...and so, hopefully, the spirit of goodness will survive."
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How did the Zulu defeat the powerful Red Coats at the Battle of Isandlwana? The answer lies in a psychoactive mushroom. ​The Secrets of the Dead episode below attempts to prove that Zulu Shamans used a mixture of

Shakafounded the Zulu Kingdom of southern Africa and was murdered in 1828 by his two half-brothers, Dingane and Mhlangana, after Shaka’s mental illness threatened to destroy the Zulu tribe.

Battle of Isandlwana, shown below in the movie Zulu Dawn, took place in 1879, fifty years after Shaka's death.
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Shaka's empire.

In this Crash Course segment on 19th century imperialism, learn about the original "tea party" and the first time business and government worked together to profit off opioid addiction
(1:40). Another time is the opioid epidemic we're experiencing today, profiled in FDA Addicted.

1. Inadequate Mental Health and Substance Abuse Care​
​America's biggest threats to national security are lack of insight, foreign and domestically. Sadly, using military and wartime jobs as a solution to job growth is a solution for some politicians. These warrior politicians have zero insight as to how their country is perceived by the rest of the world and how it factors into winning the war of ideology. This mindset is pathological.

​The American mental health system is trying to do things right by conducting rigorous research on non-drug therapies. However, if thought leaders in the United States do not focus heavily on therapies that are affordable, decent mental health care will never be available to most Americans. Insurance companies simply will not want to pay for expensive, inefficient and/or unpredictable therapies.

​The BEST mental health care access in the United States is for U.S. combat veterans. Level of care: DISMAL.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs estimates that PTSD afflicts 20 percent of Iraqi war veterans.​PTSD is also found among survivors of natural disasters, victims of crime, and many others who have experienced traumatic events. During wartime, a decent proportion of men and women in the United States military will leave service in their 20s and be on disability for the rest of their lives in a country that provides terrible mental health and substance abuse care and has a poor record of treating PTSD. The result: Untreated mental illness and self-medication with "socially acceptable" addictive substances.

"It's hard to beat an enemy that gets stronger the more you strike against him or her."

2. Unintelligent Drug Policy

A concerning disconnect exists regarding intellectual discussion of drugs in our country. How do leaders expect to improve substance dependence problems in the United States without providing adequate behavioral health, economic, and social support systems,

in a society that continues to treat drug use as a criminal rather than public health issue?
​​The human species, like other animals, seeks to achieve altered states of consciousness through a variety of substances.

On September 10, 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld held a press conference to declare $2.3 trillion missing in the Department of Defense. Rumsfeld stated, ​"The adversary's closer to home. It's the Pentagon bureaucracy." He said money wasted by the military poses a serious threat. "In fact, it could be said that it's a matter of life and death."

Government whistleblower Jim Minnery spoke to CBS News about the amount of unaccounted for money passing through the Pentagon:

"The director looked at me and said 'Why do you care about this stuff?' It took me aback, you know? My supervisor asking me why I care about doing a good job."

Former government accountant Jim Minnery was reassigned and says officials then covered up the problem by just writing it off. He is a former government accountant who said his warnings about widespread problems at the Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS) went unheeded. DFAS was created in 1991 to help the Pentagon get on top of its spending. Minnery said he left the Pentagon's central accounting office our of frustration in 2006 because his bosses weren't interested in tracking the mountains of money that passed through it.

"In fact, it could be said it's a matter of life and death," he said.
​continued below

Rumsfeld promised change but the next day – Sept. 11-- the world changed and in the rush to fund the war on terrorism, the war on waste seems to have been forgotten.

Just last week President Bush announced, "my 2003 budget calls for more than $48 billion in new defense spending."

More money for the Pentagon, CBS News Correspondent Vince Gonzales reports, while its own auditors admit the military cannot account for 25 percent of what it spends.

"According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions," Rumsfeld admitted.

$2.3 trillion — that's $8,000 for every man, woman and child in America. To understand how the Pentagon can lose track of trillions, consider the case of one military accountant who tried to find out what happened to a mere $300 million.
continued below

"We know it's gone. But we don't know what they spent it on," said Jim Minnery, Defense Finance and Accounting Service.

Minnery, a former Marine turned whistle-blower, is risking his job by speaking out for the first time about the millions he noticed were missing from one defense agency's balance sheets. Minnery tried to follow the money trail, even crisscrossing the country looking for records.

"The director looked at me and said 'Why do you care about this stuff?' It took me aback, you know? My supervisor asking me why I care about doing a good job," said Minnery.

He was reassigned and says officials then covered up the problem by just writing it off.

"They have to cover it up," he said. "That's where the corruption comes in. They have to cover up the fact that they can't do the job."continued below

The Pentagon's Inspector General "partially substantiated" several of Minnery's allegations but could not prove officials tried "to manipulate the financial statements."

Twenty years ago, Department of Defense Analyst Franklin C. Spinney made headlines exposing what he calls the "accounting games." He's still there, and although he does not speak for the Pentagon, he believes the problem has gotten worse.

"Those numbers are pie in the sky. The books are cooked routinely year after year," he said.

Another critic of Pentagon waste, Retired Vice Admiral Jack Shanahan, commanded the Navy's 2nd Fleet the first time Donald Rumsfeld served as Defense Secretary, in 1976.

In his opinion, "With good financial oversight we could find $48 billion in loose change in that building, without having to hit the taxpayers."

"We're seeing this very contradictory statement from the Administration saying that they're going after ISIS, but in the same token, they are allowing Turkey to bomb the Kurds who have been our most effective, trustworthy ground allies both in Syria and in Iraq. I'm strongly opposed to a no-fly zone because of what it would entail." –Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI), October 12, 2015

​Hepatitis C Drug The Most Costly For Medicaid: All told, 33 states spent more than $1 billion to treat the disease with Gilead Sciences' Sovaldi, according to data released Tuesday by Sens. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Ron Wyden, D-Ore. Still, the money spent was enough to treat only 2.4 percent of Medicaid patients infected with the virus.
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Crash Course's John Green:"Slavery has existed as long as humans have had civilization, but the Atlantic Slave Trade was the height, or depth, of dehumanizing, brutal, chattel slavery. American slavery ended less than 150 years ago.
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​None of the primary crops grown by slaves–sugar, tobaccco, coffee–is necessary to sustain human life. Slavery is a very early biproduct of consumer goods that bring us pleasure, but not sustenance.

By the time Europeans started importing Africans into the Americas, Europe had a long history of trading slaves. The European slave trade began after the 4th Crusade in 1204, "the crusade you will remember as the crazy one." Italian merchants imported thousands of Armenians, Circassian, and Georgian slaves to Italy. Many worked to process sugar."

Green's thoughts on the sugar trade being supported by slavery echo the words of ethnobotanist Terence McKenna in a 1996 interview (Click 'Shamans of the Amazon' below more of Luc Sala's interview with Terence).

Terence McKenna: To my mind, human history is the story of one substance after another distorting or transforming human values and society. A perfect example would be sugar.Most people don’t even think of sugar as a drug and yet, we may think that cocaine distorted moral and political values in Latin America, but sugar brought back slavery.

​Slavery actually died with the Roman Empire. Nobody worked agricultural products with slaves in the Middle Ages. It wasn’t until the early 1400s that the Portuguese began producing sugar and they used up Jews and prisoners and so then they started buying human beings from African -- from Arab traders. And the pope was in on the deal and everybody was in on the deal. I mean this is drug corruption of the central institutions of society on a massive scale.

Luc Sala: But, that has gone on ‘til our days. We have alcohol, we have tobacco.

​Terence: Well, this is my very point, that every society chooses a small number of substances – no matter how toxic – and enshrines them in its cultural values then demonizes all other substances and uses -- and then persecutes and launches witch hunts against those users whenever some political pretext requires witch hunts and persecutions. So, it’s an old game and it’s been played in many places.

Terence McKenna Blesses the Constitution the ACLUHow does it happen that American Conservatism, that used to stand for a free-market economy and a Laissez-faire attitude toward life becomes instead the purveyor of the most Draconian and invasive approach to social management ever conceived of (Drug War)